[DanBC]

Citizens don't have an absolute right to have all data erased on request.

The comments are still needed and being used for the purpose they were gathered for, so this fails the first point in your link

> the personal data are no longer necessary in relation to the purposes for which they were collected or otherwise processed;

If there is identifying data in the comment you can email the mods and they will (I think) redact it for you.

Most usernames do not identify a natural person, so that means most accounts fall outside GDPR. If they do identify a natural person I think you could email the mods and they'd change the name. (Obviously I have nothing to do with HN so I can't tell you what they will or won't do).

tl;dr most accounts aren't covered by GDPR and the mods will do stuff with the ones that are.

[LinuxBender]

Renaming gets interesting too. The person requesting the rename would have to also chase down all the off-shoots of HN that cache and re-display all the messages in different formats. And then there is archive.org that would have copies of all sites in question. Archive.org isn't going to rename anything.

[yummybear]

I don't believe this is compliant with the GDPR. Afaik usernames are considered personal data, as are user ids. Both are a form of online identifiers:

"Natural persons may be associated with online identifiers provided by their devices, applications, tools and protocols, such as internet protocol addresses, cookie identifiers or other identifiers such as radio frequency identification tags. This may leave traces which, in particular when combined with unique identifiers and other information received by the servers, may be used to create profiles of the natural persons and identify them."

[DanBC]

Sure, if I can identify the natural person from the name yummybear then yummybear is personal information.

But HN simply can't do that for most accounts, and so for most people their username isn't personal data.